NIME

The objective of this final project was to create an instrument and performance based off all of our previous classes and to that end with my partner Dylan we created launchpads like this guy:

Mine ended up looking like this at first:

Just a bunch of pushbuttons cobbled together with this patcher to run it (thanks for helping me out, Sean):

And then I upgraded to this bad boy:

not my hand, not my computer, but definitely my soldered button!

A crew of 12 were supposed to spit samples, and bust rhymes–slowly but surely though the buttons dwindled down to 6–each one dying a horrible horrible fiery melted death. So with 6 left me n dylan busted out the launchpads and got to working…until we figured it would be too hard to mix a track anyway–so we decided to build the track in logic–images of the famous composition have been lost to time, but one of the first iterations was found among the decrepit floppy disks. Listen below here–

In this week, we were asked to combine physical components with max to create a music piece that can be controlled via sensors. Continuing my concept of deconstructing classical music, I created a piece of chaos. I used a potentiometer and ultrasonic sensors to control the volumes of different samples. The piece was meant to express the modern deconstruction and reconstruction of music and redefinition of music and noise.

Project Description: Tilted Melody aims to create a mystery sonic environment by composing aleatory music which triggers by different colors and their different positions.

Project Concept: The first concept is to match the color with music. I used different colors to represent different sounds, and different positions to match with different pitches. The second concept is to create aleatory music. For the NIME course, I think making a project to have a clear new interactive method and the sound are the most important. So I used colors as the triggers of the sound and I intend to break through myself on the music producing aspect. In the previous assignments, I was limited to tempo and tunes, so this time, I tried to make chance music, each time the music is different, it all depends on what I want to do at that moments.

For the final performance, Katniss and I created the background music that stimulates the forest and used joystick to trigger animal sounds. The pressure sensors we used on the floor control the volume of each piece of music. During the performance, we randomly sanded on each pressure sensor to have the randomly combined music.

The picture of the sensor on the ground and FSR sensors we made before:

Thanks to Ariel, we changed the previous plan of using FSR sensors to trigger animal sounds because they are very unstable, while joystick only has the value of 0 and 1, which is easier to control and more stable.

Interface design:
In the concept presentation session, I received feedback of building in more physical interaction in the interface. Therefore, I bring in plants and watercolor paintings into the interface. By using the rice paper, I created a watercolor garden with another layer of dry paper covering it. When I water the dry paper, it will stick to the next layer of painting and show the patterns. In addition, I bring in real plants to represent different instrument, like an orchestra. The lego in the middle is designed to represent a person moving around to hear the singing of different plants, based on the location. With the interface design, I decided to use moisture sensor, touch sensor and joystick as hardware part.
The data processing was designed to be finished in Arduino, including distance calculation. However, when dealing with the serial communication, I found it’s easier to to the raw processing in Arduino (digital signal of on/off and Joystick location) and distance calculation in max (though looks complicated). The distance is linear mapped with volume. Sean showed me a max package spat that has advanced algorithm for spatial sound. It’s very expensive but definitely good for advanced spatial sound effect.

Lessons and Possible Improvements:
The presentation at the show could be improved for audience’s experience, especially the patterns on the rice paper, which is not easy for them to see. Leon has advised for laying out the plants over the stage to have real “tour” performance for this project. I see this is as a possible solution if I use Yun and RFID for the hardware part. But I’m not sure about the communication from Arduino Yun and Max.

For this project, we were asked to make a physical device to trigger sound in Max on the laptop, and I made an easy version of launchpad with buttons as shown in the following picture.

And by using the following Arduino code, these six buttons kept sending values of being clicked or not to Max by Serial Communication.

For the Max part, I kept on my exploration about samples and remade Future’s song Mask Off. And the following screenshots showed the Logic Pro X project and the Max patcher.

To some extent, this was a project based on my previous project, but the lessons I learned helped me a lot in the development of my final project including button choice, circuit design, serial communication, so on and so forth.

For this assignment, we were asked to create a laptop instrument that uses Max, and I used Max to recreated Kendrick Lamar’s hit song Humble.

I was inspired by this YouTube video I embedded below.

During this video, the maker recreated Kendrick Lamar’s hit song Humble using MIDI in the application Logic Pro X. So I followed this tutorial and created this Logic project as shown in the following screenshot.

After finishing the Logic file, I bounced different tracks and three piano keys to the following samples.

Afterward, I created the following Max Patcher to map different samples to the keyboard. At the same time, I turned the auto-loop of each sample on so when I played it, it would keep on looping and be the background layer of the new samples.

And in the end, during the performance, I started playing samples from drums to the base, and to the piano part in the end, which gave the audience the feeling of building the song from the sketch. And I called this performance “How to write a Billboard Top 1 Song”.